Anthropologist. PI Human Systems and Behavior Lab. Co-Director of the Omo Valley Research Project @theOVRP
Nyangatom, Ethiopia
Joined August 2018
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Got to love those culture bound syndromes; in this case Canadian lumberjacks who jump and flail about when they are startled or surprised. Nice readable review below.
NEW ESSAY — “Men with Queer Nerves”: Ross Bullen on the odd phenomenon of “Jumping Frenchmen”, French-Canadian lumberjacks in 19th-c Maine who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out w/ their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak: publicdomainreview.org/essay…
New paper shows epidemics of plague among hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago, likely from eating marmot. Suggests that high population densities may not be as important for epidemics such as the Black Death.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Everyone knows that hunting in chimpanzees is mostly by males. But in bonobos, much of the hunting is by females!! Large implications for thinking about the origins of hunting in humans. cell.com/current-biology/ful…
As far as I can tell, the claim that 5-10% of skulls are trepanated is wildly inflated and comes from a single non-empirical paper. Anyone have more reliable estimates?
"...why do 5-10% of skulls from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC, all over the world, have holes in them?"
"When did the Western world give up belief in the classical good-for-everything version of trepanation? I can’t tell for sure, but it seems to have been sometime between 2015 and 2020..."
astralcodexten.com/p/why-glo…
Luke Glowacki retweeted
For Halloween, article by @evornithology.... popsci.com/science/vampire-b…
Hard to believe there was a time when @amazon sent out book marks with their book orders. Found these in some books I was given, dated to 2001.
Anyone else concerned that with LLMs it's going to be easy to out anonymous peer reviewers when their reviews are published online. More journals are moving to this with no options for reviewers to opt out. I see the upside but think anonymity is good for the review process.
I'm teaching intro to human evolution in the spring and both exhilarated and terrified given how much and how fast we are learning about our complex origins.
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Luke Glowacki retweeted
Honey bees inject venom with a two-stroke stinger.
Learn more: scim.ag/4yXrVF5 @NewsfromScience
Luke Glowacki retweeted
Big news! Our new book, "Making the Modern Laboratory," is now available for pre-order. It is a stunning, 504-page hardcover book that explains how the research laboratory, and everything in it, came to be.
Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until could return with a prototype?
Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization?
These stories and hundreds more are told in the book, which has a hard cloth cover and is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is also finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. It is priced at $49 and worth every penny.
Learn more and order: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
We are getting ever closer to a real science of human society!
We investigated the possible transformative effects of exogenous education interventions on social interactions in traditional village settings with a randomized trial, examining the connections that individuals keep, drop, or form, as well as the overall structure of village-wide networks that might arise. nature.com/articles/s41586-0… 3/
A bit more about Photo 49 for the science history nerd in you
Paper by the Science History Institute’s Alistair Sponsel and King’s College London’s Brian Sutton uncovers the significance of Rosalind Franklin's previously captured Photo 49. Learn more about their research here: sciencehistory.org/about/new…
Luke Glowacki retweeted
This spring, I'm traveling to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Colombia, where I'll be interviewing shamans about the phenomenology of trance dances. I'm looking for folks (i.e. QRI-type people) to advise me on building a good and extremely user-friendly tool that the shamans can use to visualize their sensations.
Grateful to anyone who can link me with the right person, boost this to others, or (esp!) is down to chat more and advise! Please reply or DM if you have good leads 🙂.
@algekalipso @johnsonmxe @chris_percy @ekkolapto @cube_flipper @VisionSymmetric @AnalogWhole @theIACS @QualiaRI @42irrationalist @Josikinz
Can someone explain to me why the foremost scientific organization in the United States has the Parapsychological Association as an affiliate? Pseudoscience should not have a home in @aaas
Some history here: paranormaldailynews.com/para…
Luke Glowacki retweeted
Military alliances - across all world regions - repeatedly crumbled because of men's sexual rivalry & assaults.
My latest essay includes stories from the Torah, the Mahabharata, Rome, the Mongol Īlkhānate, & the Mughal Empire
ggd.world/p/rape-and-revenge…
Who knew that other primates sometime keep pets!
New paper!
We explore cases of non-human primates carrying, grooming and forming bonds with individuals of other species and what this might reveal about the evolution of pet-keeping.
A fun project with fantastic co-authors! @UniofOxford
link.springer.com/article/10…
